Meyerbeer: Le Prophete

Recorded live in concert at Festival d'Aix-en-Provence in 2023, this album sees the London Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sir Mark Elder join forces with Lyon Opera Chorus, Maîtrise des Bouches-du-Rhône, the Mediterranean Youth Orchestra, and an incredible cast of soloists to bring to life Meyerbeer's visionary historical drama, Le prophète. The opera is loosely based on a true story. In the 1500s, a charismatic innkeeper is converted to Anabaptism by itinerant preachers. After becoming a preacher himself, John of Leiden came to Münster and established a tyrannical rule, renaming it Jerusalem and proclaiming himself king, before later being killed. Add to this a bride who is a fighter, and the most formidable mother figure ever shown on an operatic stage, and Le prophète is the quintessential grand opera-a spectacular large-scale work that made the Paris Opera the leading stage in Europe, and Meyerbeer a composer admired and envied by the greatest. The first performances at Paris Opera were also notable for being the first time that electrical lighting was used at that theatre, to suggest a sunrise - a process specially created by the French physicist Léon Foucault and photographer Jules Duboscq.